About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Marie-Helene Bertino
Rave BOMB \"Is Adina really an alien? Or is she just lonely, confused, profoundly hurt? The joy of Beautyland lies partly in the way it rejects the simplicity of this false binary. Like Bertino’s fantastic previous novel, Parakeet (2020), this book is interested in the charged terrain of uncertainty and the tender ideas that emerge when we poke at the unknown ... From this gorgeous data of existence, Bertino taps into a particular nostalgic awe familiar to a generation of kids raised on Carl Sagan and inflatable lunchroom planetariums ... Beautyland portrays that 1980s astronomical wonder with loving skepticism, one eye on the splendor of whatever lies beyond, another on the mess of the planet we inhabit, or, more accurately, the mess we’ve made of it. Adina longs for release from her sojourn into humanity, but while she waits, she accidentally lives a meaningful life on Earth. She continues to hope for something beyond humanity, something better, and what could be more human than that?\
J. Robert Lennon
Positive The New York Times Book Review ... like a fistful of those jigsaw puzzle pieces strewn across the floor. A few fizzle before they’ve begun, but at its strongest, the book is an indelible assortment of characters in flux, fighting, flailing, failing to communicate, and eating or not eating (or hate-eating) pie. Each of the 71 stories, some just a sentence or paragraph long, tackles the small and large disappointments, existential horrors and mundane joys of modern life ... I like to imagine this collection as the prequel to Subdivision, a template for the life the nameless narrator cannot seem to recall.
J. Robert Lennon
Rave The New York Times Book Review ... a dazzling enigma packed with mysteries in miniature ... Is the Subdivision a place, an emotion or an event lodged in the back of the mind? Is it limbo, or a wall persuaded to shield us from the truth? Lennon is a masterly aggregator of dread. His refusal to neatly answer these questions allows for a bold, unsettling narrative to take shape. The main character’s memories have been fragmented, jumbled and reassembled in a district specifically zoned for her story. Every novel is a subdivision in this way: a plot of land, a land for the plot.
Hiroko Oyamada, tr. David Boyd
Rave The New York Times Book Review ...surreal and mesmerizing ... Oyamada has great fun playing with the idea of elision, building a propulsive narrative of omission and isolation ... Oyamada mines the horror in the predictability of metamorphosis — the inevitability of who we are, and who we are bound to become.
Laura van den Berg
Rave Electric Literature In Laura van den Berg’s gorgeously contemplative debut novel, Find Me, America is in the thick of a near-apocalypse brought about by widespread memory loss and eventual death ... Find Me is a distinctly American book, spotted with pilgrims and protesters dressed in black, concerned with questions of national identity. The plague is confined within the states, and Joy’s journey has glimmers of a cautionary travelogue ... It’s impossible to read this book and not consider other epidemics of forgetting, the kind that happen every day ... Van den Berg’s prose is honest and searching, an inquisitive tonic for a destroyed world. Questions plant themselves between paragraphs, unanswered, and curiosity steams through her book like a freight train of hope ... Her story sticks somewhere inside, impossible to forget.